


From the waters and the wild

by linaerys



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 08:45:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the rescue, Charles and Erik have a moment alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the waters and the wild

**Author's Note:**

> I saw _X-men: First Class_ with a bunch of fangirls yesterday. The most important question to answer after seeing such a slashy movie, is "When was the first time?" And, you know, tension is nice and all, but I don't even think they got off the coast guard boat without something happening. Because that was _instant_.

They surface together, Erik clinging to him even as his mind rebels at needing another person. A white buoy flies overboard to them, and pulls them up. Erik sits panting on the ladder for a moment. Charles is always impatient at this moment, the moment when he knows everything about someone, but they don’t even know his name.

He’s never gone as deep as he did into Erik; the intensity of the moment, something about Erik’s anger drew him in down into a horrible, nightmare past that Charles, with the practice of long years, decides to compartmentalize for now. He puts his hand on Erik’s back and waits until he is ready to stand.

Medics rush toward them, offering assistance. Charles waves them off with a hand and a firm mental _go away_. A cadet shows them to a room where they can change; the coast guard has robes and blankets. Of course they do, they do rescues like this all the time.

But Charles doesn’t. He can’t keep his eyes off Erik. He’s never encountered a mutant so potent. Not just the potential of his mutation, which is tremendous, but the depth of power behind it. He knows it from himself, the bottomless wellspring of will.

The room has metal walls, painted white. Charles finds himself shivering uncontrollably suddenly, his body fighting his mind for control. Erik wears neoprene, which kept him warm in the water, but Charles has on cotton under his wool coat, conducting cold to his limbs. Making his lips blue. He knows because Erik suddenly looks at them, and Charles has no boundaries here, right now, not after he’s opened so much to Erik. It is amazing to him that Erik can’t read his mind in return, that the sharing did not somehow go both ways. Amazing, and lonely.

“Who _are_ you?” Erik asks, his mind lost and needy for a moment before iron self-control clamps down even his thoughts. “You’re cold. Take this off. There are robes,” he says brusquely.

He turns; Charles doesn’t miss that his eyes slide away last. Charles might not be paying attention to much else, but he follows that, the catch, the thought that follows: _strong, brilliant eyes. He is beautiful. Don’t think it, he can hear you._

Charles licks his lips. “I _can_ hear you,” he says, pulling off his coat. “It’s rude, I know.” He smiles, though Erik can’t see him, can’t even feel the curve of his lips like Charles can feel Erik’s cold and the tension in his body, the taut string, near to breaking _need_ of him. He could shut this off, but that fast a severing of such a deep connection would hurt both of them. And he doesn’t want to. It is an intimacy, perhaps not one Erik would have chosen, but it exists between them anyway, it is not forced.

“I can’t shut it off quickly,” Charles explains out loud, his fingers fumbling on the buttons of his Oxford shirt. “And I couldn’t have you kill yourself.” He remembers the wonder of that moment. “I’ve never felt anything like you.”

Erik steals a look then and Charles sees himself through Erik’s eyes, the pale stretch of shoulder, trim waist—it pleases Charles that he notices—and then a shock of lust that wasn’t there before. It goes beyond aesthetic appreciation. Erik’s tight stretched tension has identified an outlet, whether he wills it or no.

“I can still hear you,” says Charles. “Sometimes there are fleeting reactions to—”

He turns as Erik does, and meets him. He gets a fleeting glimpse of what Erik planned, Erik behind him, still in his neoprene, stroking an orgasm out of Charles— _shutting him up_ —before anything else can happen, shutting out one intimacy with another. He likes it better face to face, so that’s how this happens, Erik’s mouth crashing into his, pushing him up against a bulkhead that gives more than it should under the strength of Erik’s power.

He’s usually rubbish at picking up people, but once they succumb to that first touch, Charles can read what they want next, know when they want it delivered or denied. They don’t resist much beyond that first touch. Sometimes that makes them boring. He doesn’t think Erik will be boring. He prays Erik will not be boring.

Erik kisses like he’s still drowning, his mind spinning off thoughts like a generator releasing sparks: _get out of my mind, go away, come closer_. Erik uses his power to tug down the zipper on Charles’s trousers. There’s a smug self-satisfaction in his mind.

“Your zipper is plastic,” says Charles against the hard line of Erik’s mouth.

“Metal conducts cold,” says Erik, pushing Charles’s shirt off his shoulders. He’s warmer with it off until a draft finds his skin and puckers it into gooseflesh.

“Turn around,” says Charles. Erik does. Before Charles even touches him, he takes a moment to admire the whipcord-thin, strong lines of his back, encased in black neoprene. Charles tugs down the zipper. Erik is golden underneath—the Argentinian sun, his memories provide—his skin flushed with heat. Charles is glad no one can read his mind when he pushes the suit off Erik’s shoulders and sees his perfection, the slender strength of him.

 _You just met him_ , he reminds himself, but the thought doesn’t take. He just met Erik, but he knows him, deeper than he’s known anyone else, except Raven. Erik is inside him in a way Charles can’t even think about yet, he just knows that when Erik turns toward him, profile like a honed knife, looking like every dangerous thing Charles has ever turned away from, every base impulse, he can’t resist.

“I’m not,” says Charles, “this is you, right, I’m not, God, please tell me I’m not _suggesting_ this.”

“Shouldn’t you know that?” Erik asks, pushing Charles up against the wall, harder than necessary. “If you were making me do something, what would you make me do?”

Erik bites his neck, right along the vein, right where it’s most likely to send sparks through Charles’s finely calibrated nervous system. “That, oh God, exactly that.”

“You’ll find,” says Erik, his voice scraping down Charles’s spine like another set of hands, “that coercing me is the very last thing you want to do, no matter what tricks you have.”

“I know that,” Charles gasps. “I know that so much, believe me—” He’s babbling. Erik shuts him up with another kiss, his stubble scraping along Charles’s neck. Charles pushes the neoprene off of Erik’s slim hips, and then it’s balled around his ankles, and Erik has to sit to pull it off, and Charles helps him, and then he falls over on his arse, laughing uncontrollably.

“It’s just the reaction,” says Charles. Although he doesn’t want to, there’s an opportunity to stop this here before it goes too far. “It doesn’t mean—” but he’s on his knees between Erik’s legs and Erik’s mind paints a picture so vivid Charles isn’t sure it isn’t already reality.

 _So something shuts him up_ , Erik thinks. Charles wants to be insulted but he’s not, he’s so turned on he’s gagging for it; he needs his mouth around Erik’s cock now, now, now, Erik’s desires and his own wrapped up irresistibly together.

Without the neoprene, Erik’s skin starts to cool, though it’s warm between his legs. He tastes of sea water and the rubber of his suit. His hair curls reddish around the base of it—MC1R protein mutation—then the hot, ridged feel of him sliding over Charles’s lips chases those thoughts way.

Charles can feel what Erik likes, an extension of the feedback loop that got them here. He loves this, even though it’s slightly masturbatory—it’s easier than with women, where if he feels their pleasure it’s in the wrong place, with the wrong equipment, and sometimes he shuts it out.

“You’re in my mind, aren’t you,” says Erik. His sardonic voice catches. “You can feel this.”

 _So what if I can_ , Charles thinks, loud enough for Erik to hear.

Erik’s hand tightens painfully on the back of Charles’s neck. “Don’t do that,” he says, his voice catching. “Just do—” Charles licks a long stripe up the underside of his cock “—this.”

Other times, Charles might draw this out. He can do that forever, and he will later, he promises himself, but people are waiting for them. Raven and Moira are waiting for them. Charles can feel them on the edges of his mind, pressing in.

He hardens his barriers and concentrates only on this. Erik’s pleasure, raspy edged, his fraying control as he tries not the thrust into Charles’s mouth. Charles can—and will—come from just this. Erik’s hands curl in Charles’s ( _thick_ ) hair.

He’s close, cock thickening in Charles’s mouth, mind skittering across images: his own mouth ( _red_ ) seen from above, interspersed with less pleasant things, memories of pain, thoughts of the men ( _man_ ) he pursues.

 _Don’t think about it,_ Charles urges, too quiet, he hopes, to be heard, only to be felt. And then Erik’s hand tightens around the back of his neck and he’s coming in Charles’s mouth and Charles is coming too and whatever small space he had made between himself and Erik’s mind is gone again, as he is wrapped up in Erik’s pleasure and the thread of ( _pain_ ) pain, always pain that goes with it.

Charles sits back on his heels and wipes his mouth. Erik turns so Charles can strip the rest of the way and pull on his robe. He concentrates on that sensation, warm, thick terry-cloth, skin finally heating, and on the minds of others around him, Raven, skimming the edges of her worry and excitement . Moira, a deeper look: pure motives, conflicted heart. Men with prosaic concerns go about their tasks on the ship.

Charles runs his hands through his hair, and turns to face Erik. An amused smile quirks Erik’s lips. “My name is Erik Lensherr,” he says, “but I suppose you already know that. Will you tell me yours now?”

Charles flushes and extends a hand. “Charles. Charles Xavier. Doctor.” He’s nervous, foolishly so, for he can feel Erik’s desire for him, still there though the sharp edge is gone. For now, Erik wants him for his power, but there is more there, the desire all humans, all beings have, to be known.

Erik takes his hand. His fingers are cool. Their press is uncomfortably intimate, considering how much they have already shared. “I have heard of you,” he says. “I meant to seek you out, one of these days.”

Charles puts his hand on the door, _hatch_ the mind of a sailor supplies, and looks back at Erik. “We’ve found each other, it seems.”

Erik turns the hatch’s knob with his mind. The delicious feeling of power being exercised washes over him. Erik is suddenly very close behind him. “Later, Doctor,” he says, as though he can read Charles’s flush of lust as easily as Charles read his earlier. “There’s work to be done.”


End file.
